Magazine Posts

Welcome to Kudos365 Weekly History Challenge. Test your history  knowledge and see how many of the history questions you can answer correctly. A new updated History Challenge is released every Saturday.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Comet 10P/Tempel 2 orbits the Sun once every 5.4 years. Currently visible in binoculars or small telescopes toward the constellation Capricornus, the periodic comet is captured in this sharp telescopic image from July 11 sporting a bright nuclear region and pretty greenish coma. Remarkably, a thin dust trail, not a typical dust tail, is also seen extending both east and west of the Tempel 2 nucleus. Unlike a comet dust tail, which tends to temporarily fan out in a direction away from the Sun, this dust trail is due to the residual dust shed during many past orbits along this ancient periodic comet's orbital plane. In fact, Tempel 2's dust trail may get a little narrower and brighter from our perspective as Earth crosses through the comet's orbital plane on July 20. Comet 10P/Tempel 2 will reach a perihelion on August 2, and make its closest approach to Earth on August 3.

Photo by Dan Bartlett

Westrup Heide in the early morning during the heather blossom season, Haltern am See, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This sparkling, colorful gemstone is a spiral galaxy, NGC 300. It is one of the closest spiral galaxies to Earth, only about 6 million light-years away. But does it really look like this? Here is a more standard portrait of it. This unusual image combines the light from the stars and dust within the galaxy with the light from ionized clouds of interstellar gas shown in red (Sulphur), green (Hydrogen) and blue (Oxygen). Combining red and green light in different proportions makes yellow or orange light, most visible in the image. Light from other ionized gases is also at work in neon signs, fluorescent tubes and street lights. These massive clouds of ionized gas are typically created by young, massive stars that produce high-energy ultraviolet radiation capable of ionizing the gas. Massive stars are short-lived, compared with lighter stars like our sun, and explode as supernovas at the end of their lives. Some of the colorful clouds in the image could be hiding supernova remnants.

Photo by Team Ciel Austral Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)

Emerald swift (Sceloporus malachiticus) Finca El Pilar, Antigua Guatemala. Also known as the green spiny lizard.

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Is there an angry Sith using force lightning in the Tatacoa Desert? This is not science fiction, but a red sprite with multiple streamers! Ordinary lightning occurs when thundercloud particles collide, lose their electrons, and build up negative charge at the cloud bottom. The cloud’s negative charge repels negative charge deeper into the Earth, leaving Earth’s surface positively charged. The opposite charges attract, reaching towards each other and superheating the air into a white strike of plasma. Red sprites are millisecond events triggered by positive cloud-to-ground lightning. They extend up into the mesosphere where the air is too thin for thunder. Their red glow comes from heated molecular nitrogen. There are several potential causes for red sprites, including that the preceding positive lightning exposes the negatively charged cloud core to the positively charged upper atmosphere, allowing those charges to connect. NASA’s Juno has observed sprites on Jupiter, indicating that sprites occur on other planets!

Photo by Mario Vargas Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

Adult woman of the Laarim Tribe smoking in a pipe, Kimotong, South Sudan.

Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

John Constable (1776 – 1837). English landscape painter, born in Suffolk. His work is classified as being in the Romantic tradition. He is known principally for revolutionizing the genre of landscape painting with his paintings of Dedham Vale where his home was located. The area is now known "Constable Country" Some of his most well known paintings include Wivenhoe Park (1816), Dedham Vale (1821) and The Hay Wain (1821). His paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art.